ALBANY — The Upstate Artists Guild is facing eviction from its Lark Street home of five years after failing to pay rent for four months, representatives said.

"We got behind, and we just don't have the money, but we're trying to put something together," UAG President Rebecca Schoonmaker said Monday.

The guild has not paid the $1,200-a-month rent on its gallery space, at 247 Lark St., since September. Last Friday it received notice of legal action being taken by the landlord. A court date is set for Friday that could set in motion eviction proceedings and lead to UAG being homeless by the end of the month, Schoonmaker said.

UAG has launched a campaign asking for donations from its 120 artist members as well as the public to try to raise the nearly $5,000 needed to pay back rent. The group has also applied for a line of credit from its bank, according to Schoonmaker.

She said UAG officials will meet in the next day or two with the management company that handles the property for an out-of-town landlord to try to work out a repayment plan.

A representative for the management company did not return a call seeking comment. City records show the property is owned by Hwei-Yun Chow and Hsiu-Yueh Shen of Bayside, N.J., who could not immediately be reached.

Schoonmaker and UAG co-founder Nina Stanley blamed the group's financial troubles on an art market depressed by several years of a weak economy and the grass-roots nature of a nonprofit arts organization run by volunteers.

"We're artists. We all work full time at other jobs," Stanley said. "We've never been very good at (public relations), and we need a really good grant writer; none of us really know how to do that."

She said the loss of the UAG gallery space on Lark Street would imperil the monthly First Friday art nights, when the gallery is a central location for crowds that travel to dozens of Albany business and display spaces to view art. Although technically independent efforts, UAG and First Friday have been interconnected since the latter was founded in 2006 by UAG members, and a UAG board member still volunteers as coordinator of First Friday.

The UAG Gallery began as a one-time exhibition space during Art on Lark in 2005, taking over a building that had been several clothing boutiques and art galleries over the past 20 years. By 2007, First Friday openings were drawing upward of 500 people to the gallery, and sales and fees paid by artists covered rent that had at first been donated by UAG board members, Stanley said.

Unpaid membership dues and fewer sales have made meeting the rent increasingly difficult, Schoonmaker said, though she holds out hope that the emergency fundraising campaign is successful and the requested $5,000 line of credit is granted.

"If we could just get caught up, the line of credit would help us go forward," she said.